Many personal financial management tools or software programs or products assist a user in tracking, budgeting or otherwise maintaining the user's finances. Such personal financial management tools or software products track current financial activity, such as bill paying, account reconciliation and budgeting, as well as long-term financial planning, such as saving for a home or investing for retirement. Typically, the current financial activity is modeled using text-based account screens that mimic checkbook registers. Long-term planning is usually a less accurate process; loosely correlated to current financial activity. Such long-term planning consists of either broadly estimating expenses into the future such as assuming needing a certain percentage of current income and expenses at retirement, or estimating income from select assets or investments and then computing payment schedules or compound interest accrued over the years until retirement.
Most personal financial management tools and software products track financial transactions that have been posted to a user's bank account or other financial account. Such personal financial management tools and software programs login to a user's banking system and pull, scrape, or otherwise retrieve information or data relating to that user's financial transactions. The financial transaction data is then utilized by the personal financial management tools and software products for various tracking, budgeting or other financial maintenance purposes. These personal financial management tools and software products, while containing some data regarding a financial transaction that was completed using a check or a financial transaction involving a deposit, fail to directly pull the image into the personal financial management tools and software products. Accordingly, data and information, such as the payee on a check for example, are unknown to the personal financial management tools and software products.
Further, existing personal financial management tools and software products are unable to further identify or process descriptions of transactions, which often represent the payee or the merchant. It will be appreciated that existing personal financial management tools and software providers provide their tools or software product as a separate module of a financial or banking institution's core data system, whether presented online or otherwise.